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The story
It emerged that a doujinshi apparently generated with AI had slipped into the Comic Market, sparking an ongoing debate on 5ch’s hardware/industry (Geha) board over “why exactly is AI generation bad?” Some argued there’s no problem as long as buyers can’t tell the difference, while others raised copyright concerns — and plenty of posters pointed out that the game industry already relies heavily on AI. Criticism was widespread for creators who falsely marketed their work as hand-drawn, but opinions on the use of AI itself stayed divided right to the end.
What people said
It's not like people are inspecting the art before buying, so it can't be helped.
Doujin culture is done for — if using AI counts as copyright infringement.
Hand-drawn or not, the moment you go beyond prints and start selling digital copies or merch,
it's basically a crime lol. Well, it's only prosecuted if someone files a complaint.
The game industry is anti-AI?
When they're already using it everywhere????
The only ones allowed to complain are original creators whose characters get used without permission.
The scary part is that those complaints are exactly what's coming.
For some reason the doujin side seems to think it's fine as long as it's hand-drawn.
AI's production speed is on a totally different level, so I bet people want to draw a distinction there.
Well, there's no real way to tell the difference, so nothing can be done about it.
That's dumb.
There's basically no other industry that has to nervously explain its AI use to customers like this lol
Nervously?
What are you talking about?
Honestly, game developers probably don't even understand why customers are angry.
I don't get why people are this mad about AI either.
What are you talking about, they use AI like crazy during development???
What decade do you think this is?
Even the people who are angry don't actually know why they're angry.
Go ask about other industries too lol.
You'll see how hard it is to explain things when the customers are clueless.
Every industry uses AI these days…
Did you seriously just time-travel here from the past?
I figure they're training it on customers' personal data
and using it to pummel any customer they don't like.
Can't have decent intentions behind that.
That's the lens I view that whole "controversy emblem" thing through —
maybe I'm just being fooled though.
Feels like programmers are actually the ones who'll be affected more, honestly.
Well, but craftsmen losing work to automation has always happened —
this time it just happens to include illustrators too.
Simple software can already be built with zero programming knowledge these days…
With AI manga, the art itself looks good since it's AI-made, but it comes off unnatural
because the creator has no knowledge of manga storytelling technique.
That's the common pattern right now.
So truly zero knowledge doesn't really work.
Once you're able to make something good, you're no longer at zero knowledge anyway.
We're in an era where you can build an app without writing a single line of code, and you're still going on about "programming" lol
Those manga storytelling conventions will get learned by AI too eventually.
But you can't even give AI proper instructions unless you understand the general mechanics of how it works.
Old man, you're way behind the times.
You can make it without knowing any of that.
There are literally cases of a woman with zero experience beyond office admin work single-handedly pulling off a company's digital transformation.
No way.
What you're describing is only possible in some wild future where AI senses human desires on its own and prepares things without even being asked.
I don't get what you're saying.
115 Anonymous-Trying-Way-Too-Hard 2026/08/24 (Mon) 13:22:28.96 ID:91HsHl1L0
Re: #111
No way.
What you're describing is only possible in some wild future where AI senses human desires on its own and prepares things without even being asked.
than to a person, after all.
By your own logic, if you're the one placing the order, doesn't that mean it's not really the AI doing it? lol
I've hired illustrators advertising for work online a few times before — honestly they blow deadlines and don't even understand revision requests. It was a real headache.
It's only the idiots faking hand-drawn art who are getting exposed.
You could avoid all the risk just by labeling it properly, but for some reason they don't and get flamed instead — honestly, there's no word for that but stupid.
Isn't it kind of crazy to say you should have to spell that out just to appease a handful of unhinged people?
There's probably some kind of admiration for people who can actually draw by hand.
but they don't need "AI masters" (a mocking term for people who just prompt AI instead of creating).
In the future, won't the people with that kind of knowledge be the ones in demand?
If you mean knowing how to write effective, efficient prompts,
that skill will become unnecessary too once AI advances further.
No, checking work and catching mistakes is exactly the kind of thing AI is good at.
Going back to Re: #164:
> "In the future, won't the people with that kind of knowledge be the ones in demand?"
If anything, that's a skill in demand only right now — the kind of role that AI itself will replace down the line.
Using AI is fine, but human error from people who can't use it properly is happening everywhere right now.
That's because people are trying to use an unfinished tool out in the field lol
Is this the final form of AI? No, right?
I'm not saying transitional-period knowledge is worthless, but it's not something to cling to forever either.
Training data has basically run dry already, so this is close to the final form.
No, the AI itself is doing its job fine — it's human error, sloppy usage and careless checking, that's the real problem.
Background and Key Points
Comiket (Comic Market) is the twice-yearly doujinshi convention held in Tokyo since 1975, now drawing roughly 200,000 attendees per session and tens of thousands of circles selling self-published manga, art books, and derivative fan works. Japanese doujin culture has always operated in a legal gray zone: most circles draw copyrighted characters without licenses, and rights holders have historically tolerated this as promotion rather than piracy. That backdrop matters here, because Japan’s 2018 copyright reform (Article 30-4) also gives AI training unusually broad latitude compared to the US or EU, making the sudden backlash against AI-generated doujinshi somewhat out of step with the country’s own legal stance on AI.
The thread didn’t actually split over whether AI-assisted art should be sold at Comiket at all — posters converged quickly on condemning circles that mislabeled AI output as tegaki (hand-drawn), calling that straightforward fraud. The real fault line was narrower: whether using AI is inherently a copyright or ethics problem when disclosed honestly, versus just another production tool no different from digital software the game industry already leans on heavily. Neither side landed a decisive blow, and the thread ends without resolving that core question.
What’s missing from the discussion is that Comiket’s organizing committee already has explicit circle guidelines requiring AI-generated content to be disclosed on the work itself — this wasn’t a rules vacuum the thread was debating in the abstract, but a case of an existing disclosure rule being violated. Posters also skated past the deeper tension already baked into doujin culture: circles built on unlicensed use of others’ characters objecting to AI on originality grounds sits awkwardly with that tradition, a contradiction a few posters gestured at but never fully worked through.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “[Sad News] AI-Generated Books Were Mixed In at Comiket 😡 ← Why Is This Even Bad? 🥺 [30k Likes].”
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